Madonna is free at last!
She’s cancelled the last two dates of her Paris run on “Madame X,” thus bringing this long international nightmare to an end. She got to blame the sad ending on the coronavirus, which struck in the nick of time!
On her website: “Following official notification from the Office of the Police this morning prohibiting all events with an audience attendance of over 1000, Live Nation regrets to announce the final two Madame X performances previously re-scheduled to 10-March and 11-March are forced to be cancelled.”
Madame X doesn’t end with a bang, but a whimper. Since the tour began last September in Brooklyn, Madonna has cancelled show after show, claiming intense pain and injury. I don’t doubt a bit of it. She’s 61, and she turned out to be human. That’s a lot to deal with.
But Madonna made the show rigorous, and also insisted on performing it after 10:30 at night instead of 8pm, like a regular musical. That’s what “Madame X” was, in fact, a musical with no real book, A revue. But it’s done. Soon we’ll hear numbers– record breaking this and that– but it hasn’t been easy.
As for the “Madame X” album, it was released last June 14th, and it was pretty much of a dud. To date, it’s sold 125,000 copies (paid downloads, CDs) and another 40,000 in streaming. Most of the copies sold were bundled with concert tickets, so that’s not good if the total concert tickets sold was 165,000.
Madonna is a fighter, and a survivor. She keeps trying new things. Some work, some don’t. But she’s hanging tough. She doesn’t have to: she’s loaded. She could just bed young men all year and adopt a lot of kids. But I’ll bet she’s back with a new project soon enough. First things first: knee replacement!
One two, cha cha cha.